Tuesday, December 27, 2011

"Tracers"

Adrian Magson is the author of a 5-book crime series set in London, a YA ghost book, and a writer's help book (Write On!). He is now working on a French crime series set in Picardie in the 1960s and a contemporary spy series featuring former MI5 officer Harry Tate. His latest thriller in the Harry Tate series is Deception (November 2011). Red Station, the first Harry Tate book, has been optioned by Benderspink in Hollywood, about which he is tying not to get too excited… but enjoying the buzz, anyway.

Magson applied the Page 69 Test to his second Harry Tate novel, Tracers and reports the following:
Page 69 of Tracers is about Harry Tate making a phone call. I know, hardly riveting stuff. But Harry’s activities are not entirely gunfire and mayhem. As a former MI5 (Security Services) officer, his work has generally been low key, with a mix of counter-espionage, tracking enemies of the state and fighting serious crime. After leaving MI5 (when a rogue senior officer tried to have him terminated by an assassin known as The Hit - see Red Station), he’s now working in the private sector, but still with links to the Intelligence community. In fact he’s ‘carded’ – authorised to carry a weapon, but on call if the government needs him.

This time he’s trying to find a so-called professor who has disappeared from his home in Israel and turned up in England, and tracks him to an isolated farmhouse. The phone call is to a rental agency to find out who’s inside before potentially walking into a fire-storm.

In writing the Harry Tate series, I wanted to have a believable, human ex-Intelligence officer who wants to do what he’s good at and what’s right, but finds himself constantly at the sharper end of the business. He’s no Bond, but he does know how to look after himself, and in Tracers he’s hired to find three high-level runaways, two of whom end up very quickly dead, and the third is the professor (who turns out not to be an Israeli but with links to terrorism). And in tracing people, asking questions is one of the things you have to do.

But so is carrying a gun… and using it when you have no option.
Learn more about the book and author at Adrian Magson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue